Clinical trials remain among the most expensive and time-consuming parts of drug development. Managing trials costs more than $120 billion each year worldwide. A single protocol change can stop patient recruitment for weeks and add almost €1 million to costs. Miscommunication with regulators such as the FDA and EMA can lead to further delays and uncertainty.
Biorce is addressing these challenges with Aika, an AI platform that automates and improves trial design. Aika is trained on a database of more than 1 million clinical studies. It helps research teams simulate trial models, identify potential risks, highlight regulatory issues, and reduce design time by up to 50%.
Today, Biorce has raised $52 million in Series A funding, led by DST Global Partners, with Norrsken VC and YZR Capital doubling their commitments. Mustard Seed Maze and well-known angel investors, such as Arthur Mensch (CEO of Mistral AI), Albert Nieto (founder of Seedtag), Paulo Rosado (founder of OutSystems), and Nik Storonsky (CEO of Revolut), also took part.
This investment is the largest Series A in Iberian healthtech and AI and comes only six months after Biorce’s last funding round. It shows that investors have strong confidence in the company’s technology and fast progress.
Making clinical trials faster, more reliable, and easier to access
Pedro Coelho (CEO), Clara Bernardes (Head of Clinical/CSO), José Faria (Head of Engineering), and Diogo Pisoeiro (Head of Product Design) founded Biorce to accelerate and simplify the clinical trial process.
Biorce founders tell TFN, “Biorce started from a personal experience involving my father and was founded in response to a clear and persistent market failure. Clinical trials are becoming increasingly complex, yet the way protocols are designed and managed has barely evolved in decades. This leads to delays, costly amendments, and inefficiencies that ultimately slow patient access to new therapies. We saw an opportunity to apply AI in a rigorous, scientific way to fundamentally improve how clinical trials are designed from day one.”
Aika, Biorce’s proprietary AI engine, is at the heart of the company’s technology. It uses machine learning, statistical modelling, and natural language processing to make trial design more efficient. Aika reviews clinical data, identifies risk patterns, and helps reduce costly changes while maintaining high scientific standards.
The platform’s main strengths are its AI architecture built for clinical R&D, a database of over 1 million past trials, predictive modelling to spot potential design issues, and built-in alignment with FDA and EMA rules.
As AI becomes more common in clinical trial design, Biorce competes with companies like Owkin, Huma, and QuantHealth.
“Unlike point solutions that optimise isolated steps, Biorce focuses on standardising trial design upstream, where most cost, delay, and failure are introduced. The result is faster trial startup, fewer amendments, and more reliable outcomes, without compromising scientific rigour or patient safety,” Biorce founders add.
What about diversity?
When we asked about diversity, the founders commented, “Biorce operates as an international and multidisciplinary team, with employees across Europe and the US, spanning clinical science, data science, engineering, operations… Today, 45% of our team are women, and diversity is something we take seriously and continue to invest in as we scale, particularly across gender and professional backgrounds.”
What comes next?
The new funding will help Biorce expand internationally, including opening an office in Austin, Texas. It will also support the growth of the engineering and commercial teams and accelerate Aika’s development.
Biorce founders conclude, “Over the next three to five years, our focus is on scaling Biorce as the reference platform for AI-driven clinical trial design globally. This includes expanding adoption among large pharmaceutical companies, biotech firms, and CROs, deepening our product capabilities, and continuing to invest in world-class talent across product, engineering, and clinical science.”
They add, “Our long-term ambition is to enable what we internally describe as a “one-click clinical trial”. A future where complex trial design decisions can be made faster, more reliably, and more consistently through AI, helping set a new industry standard for how clinical trials are designed and run”
